Another log update
I’m not much a fan of new year’s resolutions, but for this year I had a goal for this blog: write at least 6 posts. This means an average of a post every 2 months, which felt very reasonable to me.
I decided on this goal as a first step to making myself more visible to folks around the world. As a starting point, I ended up changing this blog’s skin and adding an “about me” section during this year’s first week (I talked about this on log update ).
This helped me write more, and I ended up with 16 posts in 2024 (excluding both log updates). The post that took the longest time and effort to write was definitely Exploring a future of programming . During the last couple weeks of the year, I started planning a sequel to it, but I felt the need to reorganise the blog some more.
While the change made at the beginning of the year was a great motivation for writing, it lacked an important feature that I like to use: digressions. I previously used the blog’s support for block quotes as a workaround. Given that longer posts are full of digressions and I was planning to write possibly my longest post yet, I had to do something about it, so I decided to give this blog another lift.
I moved away from Hugo and rebuilt the blog with Astro . Astro’s pipeline and way of organising things felt more intuitive to me. With Hugo, I had to keep digging into the docs to relearn how it works, and never figured out how to properly make a website+blog combo, so I decided to drop it. Astro has been smooth and a great decision so far.
I also changed the blog’s skin. This time, I only briefly based myself on an existing theme before ripping essentially everything off and doing things myself. I provide light and dark themes now, which at the moment is picked automatically by your browser based on your preferences. I still choose not to use JavaScript on my blog, which limits some things I can do.
In 2024 I discovered Matthew Butterick’s wonderful Practical Typography , and wanted to bring some of the learnings to this blog, so along with the reskin I did a pass through all my previous posts to make everything more consistent. As part of this work, I decided to splurge on a body font that fits me better: Heliotrope , by Matthew Butterick. MB’s description of the font resonates with me a lot:
Heliotrope is neither sans nor serif. Rather, it’s a hybrid, combining the structural skeleton of a sans with the stroke contrast and readability of a serif. The italic is inspired by blackletter faces. Is it the weirdest font I’ve ever designed? Maybe. But it wears its weirdness mildly.
This speaks to my core. To find a balance between options, borrow parts that resonate and weave them in a consistent manner. Being weird, but in an interesting and mildly provoking way. Making a statement that with thoughtfulness and understanding of how things work, we can create new things that stand on their own foundations.
As a result of revisiting older posts, I noticed that I grew a bit as a writer. My earlier content read like incoherent rambling to me, being too conversational and circling on the same point for too long. I rewrote some older posts, especially Workflow engines, Kubernetes, and WebAssembly , since that post was a contributing factor for me to start exploring a future of programming.
Plans for 2025
Not everything in the blog is working exactly as I wanted to, so throughout 2025 I’ll dedicate some time to tidy things up. I’m sticking with the goal of writing at least 6 posts. While I think I’ll end up with a number closer to 16 once again, having a reasonable absolute minimum to reach is the only important goal.
I’m also adopting a longer-term goal to write at least one long post about the work I’m doing each year. As I mentioned before, in 2025 this will be a sequel to Exploring a future of programming . While that post hasn’t attracted the interest I was expecting, I feel one of the most important contributions I can make to the world is to keep writing about what I’m working on.
Thank you
I appreciate everyone who puts time to read my posts. My writing can be inconsistent and confusing sometimes, but know that I’m also trying to improve. Rewriting my older content shows that I’m putting in the effort. So if you’ve read anything on this blog before, thank you.